Transformed at the Withers

I'm looking at my Chiron return in March, which is sort of the last stand at the OK Corral to have any hope of budging that kundalini upstream. I'm working hard, truly. Chiron is an area of life where you will be made aware, like it or not; other interpretations say it is where you are wounded and where you have the most to teach.

I have Chiron in Pisces in the 9th, which explains my hopeless inability to get published or educated, and also my lucky ability to learn by osmosis. It is supposed to mean that I am a natural teacher. No one wants to learn anything from me, except about what not to do. I am also supposed to be able to teach psychically and must serve in this manner. Yeah, right. If you would like to know about your Chiron, put your date and TIME and place of birth in the comments or email it, and I'll send you an interpretation.

The Chiron return comes around ages 49 to 51; I'm on the younger side of this one for once. But its looming also signifies that I'm old, and has me reading about things like post-menopausal vaginal atrophy. Which scares the fuck out of me, literally, and has me diving for the Chinese herbs. A cool woman I'd met said she was taking testosterone, and that made me wonder, so I was doing some research. OK, so I don't have to worry about it, technically, for 10 years or more, and OK, it doesn't happen to everyone, but atrophy. Freak. Me. Out. And I'm thinking if it were penis atrophy, we'd have a 24/7/365 Jerry Lewis telethon about it to address this problem RIGHT NOW.

Then again, I'm doing some pay work on prostate cancer, and it's also freaking me out how little is done about this relative to breast cancer, and how often surgery is the first go-to when maybe it's not needed. Who would have thought I'd live to see a time when men go to doctors and don't hear about their choices? Progress?

So here is an old poem that has been aging in the little red notebook since this summer.

Aging Marionettes
What he called us--
The mahogany knob of his--
Wait for it--elbow
Crooked around the cords
Of my neck, hand dangling
At the sanded-smooth
Mound of my breast, pink tip
Only slightly nicked.
Cable-muscled arms and lank of legs
Worn thin by always moving, moving
Both of us still swaying slowly, facing ourselves
In the full-length mirror
In the Holiday Inn.

The Secret to Endurance Can Be Yours

How can you run for three hours without an iPod, is what people seem to want to know most. I did a trail half-marathon in a leisurely 3:22 yesterday, walking the last mile and a half because of knee pain (might be IT band again, might not; a few days will tell). I still want to attempt the 50k before I'm 50, which gives me a year and a half. (And at my pace, it might take a year and a half to run it.) But if the IT band is back, I might be stuck with 10-milers forever. There are worse things.

I also saw two copperheads.

So I run through pain sometimes, and there is a lot of pain, there's no getting around it. My great discovery arrived by accident, as they do. I found that through my alternating of three basic thought patterns is associated long, sometimes painful runs with pleasure, sometimes great pleasure. First there's the union with the earth and what it gives: In my polymorphous perversity simply putting my right hand down on one of the Grandfather rocks on Bear Island can make my head spin happily. Then there's the association with creative pleasure; writing poems and prose in my head when I run. The third secret--and there must always be three--was recalled to me recently by the wise counsel of a friend who recommended: "Next time you're standing around in line or traffic getting impatient and angry, think about the last orgasm you had."

TMI? Well excuse the fuck out of me. Did you happen to see the sign up top that says "blog"? TMI is intrinsic to the medium.

My ongoing games of "who would you do" on the trail keep me in the moment; when the moment becomes too painful, something similar to my friend's advice gets me out of the time and place that's troubling me. Of course, a man would be the source for that advice and arguably would find it most useful. It's a little more difficult for women. Oh, that's not what I meant. I mean women are more apt to ponder not only the event itself but those precipitating and succeeding it, i.e., "well, that was fun, but I'm still mad at him nonetheless," or, "will that be the last one ever?" or, "why couldn't it have been with this or that person, instead?" or, worst of all, my sisters, and you need to STOP this, "was I too fat/loud/silly/strange/etc." At that point, one needs to cycle back into living in the moment, and touch a rock or something.

Sometimes I also think about landscaping or health care policy.

But never baseball.

Photo: from the NPS website, Bear Island, where the rocks are like none other.

What Tiger Woods Didn't Do

The golfer didn't do any of these things:

--Refuse to sell a breast cancer survivor health insurance.
--Cut off funding for children's health care.
--Take gift cards given as holiday help to the poor and spend them on himself.
--Make peanut butter with factory equipment contaminated with salmonella.
--Tell a homeowner in trouble that he could help them get a new loan to avoid foreclosure, take the last of her savings, and run off.
--Spend people's retirement savings on bottle service in nightclubs.
--Collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses after running a company into the ground.
--Threaten to expose a CIA agent as political retaliation.
--Make up news in order to promote a political agenda.
--Threaten harm to a witness in a drive-by murder case.
--Dump PCBs into a creek.
--Continue to manufacture known carcinogens.
--Refuse to meet safety standards in a mine, causing deaths of workers.
--Lay off hundreds of people to save his stock options.

What he did do, apparently:
--Have sex.

Why are people so upset about that last thing, and not mad at all the people who did all those other things?